Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes Of The Afternoon   

1943

Maya Deren

I've been waking up before the sun these days. Today I woke up with this.

Eleanora Derenkowsky (Maya Deren) was born in 1917 in the Ukraine, but in 1922, with threats of anti-semitism, her family fled to New York State. Her younger years were spent at The League of Nations International School in Geneva. Deren attended both Syracuse and New York University, where she studied political science and journalism. Much of this educational background really comes out in her later documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. In her early adulthood, she was primarily a dancer, traveling the United States with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. It was during a tour with the company that brought Deren in contact with Alexander Hammid, her would-be husband. Together, they produced the film above. Her first, and some would say, most successful work. Her work is often very critical of social rituals, and she uses physical landscapes to represent the complexity and/or spaciousness within our communities, ourselves, and our intimidations. Deren was one of the most influential and distinguished avant garde filmmakers and film theorists. At Land and The Very Eye of Night are two other examples of her incredible work, which involve and make use of Deren's professional knowledge and experience with dance. In 1943, Deren began a collaboration with Marchel Duchamp on a film entitled The Witches' Cradle -the film was never completed. 

'In an anagram all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship. Consequently, within it, nothing is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new… Each element of an anagram is so related to the whole that no one of them may be changed without affecting its series and so affecting the whole. And conversely the whole is so related to every part that whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact.'
-Maya Deren